Reading list for Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Book club or none, consider reading a book about sexual violence during April! We have compiled this list of recommended reading to help you pick a book that sounds interesting to you. Post a comment letting us know your favorite book related to sexual violence.

Transforming a Rape Culture
Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth
First published in 1993, this pioneering anthology is a powerful polemic for fundamental cultural change: the transformation of basic attitudes about power, gender, race, and sexuality.

Push
Sapphire
An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl’s horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno.

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti
In this groundbreaking new look at rape edited by writer and activist Jaclyn Freidman and author Jessica Valenti, the way we view rape in our culture is finally dismantled and replaced with a genuine understanding and respect for female sexual pleasure.

The Purity Myth
Jessica Valenti
The United States is obsessed with virginity from the media to schools to government agencies. The Purity Myth is an important and timely critique of about why this is so, and why it’s problematic for girls and women. Analyzing cultural stereotypes and media messages, Jessica Valenti reveals the overt and hidden ways our society links a woman’s worth to her sexuality rather than to values like honesty, kindness, and altruism.

I Never Called It Rape
Robin Warshaw
The classic book that broke new ground by thoroughly reporting on the widespread problem of date and acquaintance rape has now been completely updated to include recent studies, issues, current events, and controversies.

Stone Butch Blues: A Novel
Leslie Feinberg
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence.

Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery
Patricia Weaver Francisco
In this intimate memoir, Patricia Weaver Francisco tells of her fifteen-year journey to recognize and overcome the effects of a violent rape.

Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
Speak’s gripping plot and powerful characters, along with its raw and unvarnished look at high school life, make it a very popular book among young adults. Speak tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a freshman who is starting her first year of high school with a huge problem.

Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
Set in the rural South, this tale centers around the Boatwright family, a proud and close knit clan known for their drinking, fighting, and womanizing.

Against Our Will: Men Women and Rape
Susan Brownmiller
The most comprehensive study of rape ever offered to the public…It forces readers to take a fresh look at their own attitudes toward this devastating crime.

Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
Robert Jensen
In our culture, porn makes the man. So argues Robert Jensen in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Jensen’s treatise begins with a simple demand: “Be a man.” It ends with a defiant response: “I chose to struggle to be a human being.” The journey from masculinity to humanity is found in the candid and intelligent exploration of porn’s devastating role in defining masculinity.

The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help
Jackson Katz
THE MACHO PARADOX is the first book ever to comprehensively and convincingly make the case that violence against women is a men’s issue. Jackson Katz, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on this subject, takes the reader deep inside male culture to examine why so many men physically and sexually abuse women and children, including those closest to them.

Pornified: How the Culture of Pornography is Changing Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families
Pamela Paul
Over the past ten years, technological advances, cultural shifts and social attitudes have transformed the pornography landscape. PORNIFIED is the first book to look at how this new culture of pornography is transforming people’s lives in the 21st century.